In 1947, in the wake of the communist takeover of Poland, he became a political refugee, living in France and later in the United Kingdom, where he was the leader of the People's Party in exile.

[1][2] His father Marcin, a leading citizen of the village, could read and write, and was involved in the patriotic movement of Lesser Poland, the historic region to which Ruda belonged.

[3][4] Kot attended elementary school in Czarna and Sędziszów and gymnasium in Rzeszów,[5][6] and became active in Polish-independence youth groups in Galicia, part of the Austrian partition of Poland.

[7] From 1914 to 1917 or 1919 (sources vary) he published a newspaper, Wiadomości Polskie (Polish News);[2][7] during that time, his political views shifted from left-leaning to centrist.

[13] After Poland had in November 1918 regained independence, incarnated as the Second Polish Republic, Kot in 1919 co-founded a publishing house, Krakowska Spółka Wydawnicza [pl],[14] best known for publishing the book series, Biblioteka Narodowa [pl] (The National Library), which continues to the present; up to the outbreak of World War II, he oversaw the publication of 177 volumes.

[7] In 1920 Kot habilitated his doctorate[1][15] and was appointed a professor at Kraków's Jagiellonian University, in 1924 earning a full professorship and holding a chair in the History of Culture newly created for him.

[1][2] For a while he also edited another journal, Archiwum do dziejów literatury i oświaty (Archive for the History of Literature and Education), published by the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences.

[2] Wiktor Weintraub writes that Kot was a university professor for a period of only thirteen years, cut short by the consequences of his political activities; and that, in assessing Kot the scholar, "one cannot avoid a certain feeling of frustration" since, while he produced substantial research in the decade following his 1909 Ph.D. degree, despite the disruptions of World War I, his subsequent scholarship lost its initial drive and was not as productive.

[19] In 1933, when the Sanation government controlled by Józef Piłsudski was mistreating political prisoners at the Brześć fortress, Kot was a principal organizer of a protest by university professors.

[1][22][6] In 1939, after the German invasion of Poland and the start of the Second World War, Kot escaped to Romania, then through Hungary and Switzerland to France, where in October 1939 he took part in forming the Polish Government in Exile.

[26]: 100  Despite his attempts, he failed to secure the release of some, including Polish-Jewish Bund and Second International executive-committee members Viktor Alter and Henryk Ehrlich.

This was rejected by Stalin, who used the fact that the Germans had also requested such an investigation as "proof" of a Polish-German conspiracy, and turned it into a pretext for breaking off Polish-Soviet diplomatic relations.

[7] In July 1945 Kot returned to Poland with a number of politicians, including Stanisław Mikołajczyk, who hoped to establish a dialogue with the new communist authorities.

[33] He received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to publish a study on the Reformation in Poland, but was unable to finish it before his health deteriorated.

[36][37] Peter Brock and Zdzisław Pietrzyk [pl] write: "Like a long line of historians beginning in antiquity, Stanisław Kot was both a writer of history and a politician who helped to shape events.

Whereas in his scholarly writings he preserved a calm impartiality, with any polemical thrust usually concealed from the reader's view, Kot from his [secondary]-school days emerged as 'a passionate politician, evoking strong emotions and partisan prejudices'.

"[38] Polish communist-era historiography described him as a reactionary leader of the extreme nationalist right, even calling him "the greatest enemy of communism and of the revolutionary currents of worker-peasant collaboration.

"[7] In the West, some Polish émigrés criticized him for opposing Józef Piłsudski's interbellum Sanation political movement and for attempting to find a modus vivendi with communist authorities during and after World War II.

In 1928, Sanation founder Józef Piłsudski had relieved Władysław Sikorski of his army command; the latter would go on to become Kot's colleague in the wartime exile government.

[1][2][39] Critics have seen Kot's last official appointment, as the Polish communist government's ambassador to Rome, as a disappointing end to his political career.

[39] Janusz Tazbir comments that "it is a tragedy" that, too often in Kot's life, especially after 1939, "the mediocre politician stole the limelight from the magisterial scholar".

[8]: 37  Lucyna Hurło writes that "his works in the... history of education, culture, literature, and [the R]eformation and Antitrinitarianism exemplify [scholarly] reliability.

"[7] Waclaw Soroka writes that "in Kot, the intellectual history of Poland and Eastern and Central Europe gained an outstanding researcher and exponent.

"[19] Kot won high praise for his organizational activities, including his work with committees, his founding and editing of scholarly journals and book series, his organizing of conferences, his mentoring of numerous graduate students.

[43] Conference materials were published in a 2001 book of the same title, whose cover note described Kot as "undeniably a great scholar and politician".